I won’t go into the details of how and why I ended up asking such a ridiculously easy and pointless exam question. I’ll spare you the utter dejection and desperation. Suffice to say that I ended up asking it. In the desperate hope that the soon-to-have-a-BS students had tweaked to my announcement that “if you form the plural of “manus” as “mani” I’ll flunk you outright“, and realised that Latin terms for bones would, despite all their protest that they didn’t have Latin in school, would turn to applied geosciences, didn’t like my [dinosaur] shirt, or hadn’t brought their pencils, form part of the test. A vain hope, as I soon should see.

OK, here’s the question – I didn’t phrase it like this, but rather gave a table of plurals and singulars of five terms, with one column empty for each. But in the end, it amount to this:

What is the plural of “femur”?

The ~40 students together gave me a choice of 19 different answers. Here they are, in their whole and utter idiocy, laziness and absurd glory (note that this test was in German):